Tunas and purslane

Sat Nov 5 17:54:00 UTC 2011

Hi David,

Yes, Matias Alonso does not mark vowel length, hence my question. It is
actually interestingly organized as a word menu (by semantic field)
although the final aspirations are randomly marked or not marked. I am not
sure that the root in itsmitl (tetsmitl-a:itsmitl) is in any way related to
i:tstli even though Hernandez does relate the semantics of the plant and
blade.

In the Balsa area to:mohtli is the term for the prickly pear fruit and
discussions about whether a given plant is a to:motli is based on whether
it produces this fruit. No:chtli is used only for no:chmahtlapahli, a very
small, low-to-the ground Opuntia that I have not yet had identified (it was
just collected this summer; its fruit is used to color masa when totopoxtli
(sweet, ruffled tortillas) are made for Corpus Christi. I havenºt found
to:mohtli in any other sources to date.

By the way, I have put up a few notes on
http://www.balsas-nahuatl.org/ethnobiology . They are quite random for now.
The chapolin one discusses a general approach.

Jonathan

On Sat, Nov 5, 2011 at 1:04 PM, David Wright <dcwright at prodigy.net.mx>wrote:

> Estimado Jonathan:****
>
> ** **
>
> Thanks. This is all very useful.****
>
> ** **
>
> Just last week I was talking Nahuatl etymology and botany over coffee with
> Alejandro de Ávila in Puebla, at the annual Otopames conference. In fact,
> his suggestion that you would have useful information on this topic was my
> initial motivation to post my questions regarding tunas and purslane to
> this list. He sent me a link to the order form for the Paper Museum volume
> and it’s on my desk as I write. The publishers are selling it for $196 USD,
> so I’m still thinking about it, but now that I’ve acquired a deeper
> awareness of the importance of biology in iconographical and toponymical
> studies, and having read your comments on the studies included in this
> volume, I probably won’t be able to hold out much longer.****
>
> ** **
>
> I noticed that Francisco Hernández also has “tetzmitl” (buried in his
> description of tzonpachtli, book 1, chapter 161) and “aytzmitl” (twice:
> book 3, chapters 67 and 211). Your suggestion that this may be a semantic
> contrast is duly noted, and tips the scale in my head in favor of te(tl)
> rather than te:-. The fact that Molina also registers “tetzmitl” and that
> the loss of the i: of i:tz(tli) doesn’t fit the usual pattern still sets
> off a flashing red light, but there have been other times when Nahuatl
> doesn’t seem to fit into our grammatical and morphophonological
> expectations.****
>
> ** **
>
> I’m sorry about having slipped colons into the Acatlán word “itzmitl”. My
> head was in automatic long-vowel restoration mode, and I was assuming that
> the roots were i:tz(tli) + mi:tl. My only source is the *Vocabulario
> náhuatl-español de Acatlán, Guerrero* by Marcos Matías Alonso and
> Constantino Medina Lima (2nd. ed., CIESAS/Plaza y Valdés, 1996), and vowel
> contrast is not marked. I just checked my main long-vowel-marking
> dictionaries. Karttunen gives i:tztli, Bierhorst itztli, and Wolf both
> i:tztli and itztli, so the i in this noun doesn’t appear to be long across
> the board. It’s always long in mi:tl, though.****
>
> ** **
>
> So tekono:xtli is just teono:xtli with an extra /k/. I never would have
> guessed that.****
>
> ** **
>
> I think you’re right about the botanical difference between teo:no:chtli
> and teno:chtli. The 16th century sources make it clear that the former is
> an organ pipe cactus (Pachycereus sp.) and the latter is a prickly pear
> (Opuntia sp.) (see the Florentine Codex [book 11, chapter 7, paragraph 12],
> Francisco Hernández’s botanical treatise [book 6, chapters 108, 110], the
> Codex Cruz-Badiano [f. 17v], and the toponymical signs in the pictorial
> sources, e.g. Codex Mendoza: “Tenochtitlan” [ff. 2r, 4v, 19r] vs.
> “Teonochtitlan” [f. 42r]). Several authors have confused the two (e.g.
> Laura White Olascoaga and Carmen Zepeda Gómez, *El paraíso botánico del
> convento de Malinalco, estado de México* [Toluca, UAEM, 2005], where the
> organ pipe cactus is unfortunately depicted and described under the heading
> “Tenochtli”). In Nahua plant taxonomy the “generic” part of the word,
> no:chtli, refers to cactus fruit, in contrast to modern botanical taxonomy,
> where the morphology of the plant as a whole determines the genus. This
> important distinction has confused a lot of people.****
>
> ** **
>
> Thanks again for your invaluable input, which will be cited in my paper
> (now over six weeks past deadline, thanks to my new interest in botany),
> using the Nahuat-l Archives site as a reference.****
>
> ** **
>
> Saludos desde Guanajuato,****
>
> ** **
>
> David****
>
> ** **
>
> *De:* Jonathan Amith [mailto:jdanahuatl at gmail.com]
> *Enviado el:* viernes, 04 de noviembre de 2011 21:44
> *Para:* David Wright
> *CC:* Nahuat-l
>
> *Asunto:* Re: [Nahuat-l] Tunas and purslane****
>
> ** **
>
> Hi David,****
>
>  ****
>
> There is a commentary to the works of Hernández, vol. 7 in the UNAM series
> (this vol. published 1984). A fantastic commentary is that of Alejandro de
> Avila on The Badianus, published as The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo
> Flora, Flora: The Aztec Herbal (Martin Clayton, Luigi Guerrini and
> Alejandro de Ávila). I think it is $175 but I waited until Barnes and Noble
> had a 50% discount for members on a book of their choice!. ****
>
>  ****
>
> There seems to be a conflation of nomenclature referring to species of the
> Aizoaceae and Crassulaceae families on the one hand, and the verdolaga
> (Portulaca oleracea L.) on the other. One evidence is what I mentioned of
> the tetsmitl look-alike being Trianthema portulacastrum L. (Aizoaceae). It
> is an interesting coincidence that in Latin the species name is
> portulacastrum (I am not sure what the latin suffix means here)
>
> In the Balsas valley there is also a:itsmitl, Ludwigia peploides (Kunth)
> Raven (Onagraeae), which suggests a division te+ itsmitl vs. a:+ itsmitl.
> Both are very low lying plants. A further example is tli:ltik a:itsmitl
> Bourreria spathulata (Miers.) Hemsl. (Boraginaceae).****
>
>  ****
>
> Many have identified tetsmitl as a Sedum spp. (Crassulaceae) another of
> those fleshy-leaved plants (cf Alejandro de Avila, p. 86). In the Sierra
> Norte de Puebla Kalanchoe pinnata (Lam.) (Crassulaceae) is called
> sese:kpahtli. It is not unusual for fleshy-leafed plants to be called
> something along these lines given that the leaves can be cut open parallel
> to their surfaces and are cool inside, often used as compressed.****
>
>  ****
>
> Where did you get the information on vowel length in Acatlan?****
>
>  ****
>
> There is documentation of teo:no:chtli as a Pachycereus sp as various
> authors have given this for Hernandez and Badianus. In Ameyaltepec I have
> teono:xtli and in Oapan tekono:xtli. I checked as much as I could until I
> finally resigned myself to a short /o/ in Ameyaltepec. The local cognate
> for classical teo:- is tio:-, not teo-, so perhaps this is a frozen form
> with irregular length. The /k/ is unusual in Oapan, but clearly the same
> etymology. Oapan has komitetl for 'bone' and in several other cases seem to
> insert /k/ for no clear reason or established pattern. Most often it is
> deleted (telesa for teliksa, ixitl for ikxitl, etc.). I do not think
> tekono:xtli is related to teko:n+no:chtli. But I would think that
> teo:no:chtli and teno:chtli are different.****
>
>  ****
>
>  ****
>
>  ****
>
>  ****
>
>  ****
>
>  ****
>
>  ****
>
> On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 3:40 PM, David Wright <dcwright at prodigy.net.mx>
> wrote:****
>
> Jonathan:****
>
>  ****
>
> Molina has “Tetzmitl. cierta yerua”. Since there doesn’t seem to be a noun
> “tetztli”, I first thought of te + i:tz + mi:tl, but this combination
> should take the form tei:tzmi:tl, considering the length of the first two
> vowels and the usual patterns of elision (at least in 16th century central
> Mexican Nahuatl), so I guess the first syllable must be the indefinite
> human possessive prefix te:-, thus te:tzmi:tl, “someone’s obsidian arrow”
> or “people’s obsidian arrow”, although I still miss the i: of i:tz(tli).
> The fact that in Acatlán, Guerrero i:tzmi:tl is “verdolaga” is what most
> tempts me to restore the i:.****
>
>  ****
>
> Your tekono:xtli looks like the hypothetical classical Nahuatl word
> teco:nno:chtli, (teco:ma - a)+ no:chtli (m + n > nn), “prickly pear of the
> globular pot” or “globular prickly pear”. Both morphophonological changes
> would be regular in early colonial central Nahuatl.****
>
>  ****
>
> Teono:xtli as Pachycereus grandis coincides with the illustration of the
> “Teonochtli” in the Codex Cruz-Badiano (f. 17v), depicting a single-column
> organ pipe cactus. I suppose that would be teo:no:chtli (teo: + no:chtli)
> in classical Nahuatl.****
>
>  ****
>
> So far the strongest evidence I have that the word teno:chtli was used to
> name a species of plant (other than the toponymical and mythical aspects
> mentioned by Roberto) is the brief description given by Francisco Hernández
> in the 16th century:****
>
>
> http://www.ibiologia.unam.mx/plantasnuevaespana/pdf/historia_de_las_plantas_III_6_4.pdf#page=10Other than this, the botanical use of the word seems quite scarce
> throughout time and space.****
>
>  ****
>
> (By the way, the Instituto de Biología of the UNAM put up a very
> functional electronic version of Hernández’s botanical treatise last year.
> That’s where the preceding URL is from; the home page is here:
> http://www.ibiologia.unam.mx/plantasnuevaespana/ I’ve needed a resource
> like this for years.)****
>
>  ****
>
> Thanks again for your help. I’ll copy this to the list to see if anyone
> has any more useful comments.****
>
>  ****
>
> *******************************************************
>
> De:   Jonathan Amith [jdanahuatl at gmail.com]****
>
> Enviado el: viernes, 04 de noviembre de 2011 07:36****
>
> Para: roberto romero****
>
> CC:   David Wright; Nahuatl at lists.famsi.org****
>
> Asunto:     Re: [Nahuat-l] Tunas and purslane****
>
>  ****
>
> Hi David,****
>
> In the Balsas valley of Guerrero tetsmitl is Portulaca oleracea L.
> (verdolaga). There is a tetsmitl "look alike" í:tlatlá:k in Oapan, that is
> an Aizoaceae, Trianthema portulacastrum L.****
>
> For the Opuntia I have tekono:xtli in Oapan, and teono:xtli (sic) for the
> inside rods of a certain cactus, apparently Pachycereus grandis Rose, but
> maybe also some Opuntias. .****
>
> ** **
>
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